Persuasive Games: Video Game Zen

Wandering

There
are fewer connections between walking and meditation, although you
can find new age relaxation remedies that try to combine the
two. No matter, the practice of meandering has been connected with
salutary effects for centuries. Medieval labyrinths were thought to
provide pathways to commune with God, a kind of surrogate pilgrimage.
Henry David Thoreau wandered the ponds of Walden in the mid 19th
century at the same time as Charles Baudelaire wandered the streets
of Paris, ennobling an increasingly alien environment with a kind of
haphazard strolling, or flânerie.

The
early PDP text adventure game Adventure (sometimes called
Colossal Cave Adventure) was inspired by Will Crowther's hobby
of caving. Later adventure games like Zork and The Legend
of Zelda continued the lineage of exploration as a part of the
experience, but the persistence of riddles, puzzles, and enemies
quickly make calm meandering in these games difficult.

As
so-called open world video games have become more popular, so larger
and more complex simulated environments are available for meandering.
Grand Theft Auto and games of its ilk retain some of the
nuisances of gameplay -- police, rival gangs and so forth -- but
their larger spaces also allow the player to hide from the game. One
example is Jim Munroe's My Trip to Liberty City, a machinima
travelogue of the Munroe's "walking tour" of GTA III's
urban landscape.

The
most meander-inducing of video game saunters must be Yu Suzuki's
Shenmue. Although it is an adventure game by genre, a
combination of abstruseness and free movement in the game's Yokosuka
district makes wandering around this quiet city its own reward.
Passing time and changing weather in Shenmue vary this
environment, as do similar dynamics in GTA and Animal
Crossing. In a game like Ico, not knowing whether a door
is usable or not can lead to frustration. But in Shenmue, the
slow plod up stairs to a row of apartments offers strange
satisfaction.

Looking
Forward, Leaning Back

Because
relaxation and meditation rely on inaction rather than action, they
threaten to undermine the very nature of video games. There is a fine
line between producing Zen and satirizing it. The infamous,
unreleased Penn & Teller's Smoke and Mirrors for Sega CD
featured a minigame called Desert Bus, in which the player would make
the eight hour drive from Tuscon to Las Vegas in real time, taking
the wheel of a bus whose steering pulled slightly. Highway driving
can indeed be calming, but Desert Bus is probably more conceptual art
than meditation game.

As
Animal Crossing invites, a real meditation game would reject
graphical sensuality in favor of simplicity and austerity. I recently
created Guru Meditation, a Zen
meditation game for the Atari 2600 for play on a nearly forgotten
1982 Amiga peripheral called the Joyboard.
The game also pays homage to an apocryphal story about how Amiga
engineers tried to sit still on the joyboard's plastic platform to
recover from frustrating kernel panics during the authoring of the
Amiga OS.

My version is designed to be played by sitting cross-legged
on the joyboard, without moving. Responding to flOw and Wild
Divine's unfortunate conflation of tranquility and visual
sensuousness, Guru Meditation takes advantage of the Atari's
more primitive graphics to deemphasize a sensation of the outside
world, in favor of an inner one.

As
we think about Zen games on platforms more commercially viable than
the Atari VCS, we may have to reject the ideology of engagement.
Relaxation and reflection arise from constrained environments in
which the senses are deemphasized and focused rather than escalated
and expanded. Video games may often overwhelm and titillate our
senses, but Zen comes instead from withdrawal and placidity. Video
game Zen demands us to abandon the value of leaning forward and focus
on how games can also allow players to achieve satisfaction by
leaning back.